But everybody breast feeds over there…

At a Mom and child get-together in the US, I was surprised to meet the sight of a Mother breast feeding a human nearly tall enough to have a Driver’s license, the baby blanket went on forever. She told me that she was in the midst of weaning her nearly four year old son but that he had just had a tantrum and this was the best way of calming him down. This was way too weird for me, new off the boat from Paris where I had never seen a breast feeder in public. However, this was LA, land like the breakfast cereal, filled with fruit, flakes and nuts.

After a while, when Moms learned that I had raised a child in France, they questioned why I wasn’t breast feeding her in order to give her the best start in life. “Doesn’t everyone breast feed over there?”

Well, no…and for the first few months of my daughter’s life, I think that I was about the only one in the city. Of my few friends who had started making babies, I was the only one breast feeding.

At one of the best maternity hospitals in the city where I gave birth, I was asked if I had the intention of giving “breast or bottle?” When I replied breast, the nurse raised her eyes to the ceiling and left me alone for the rest of my week long stay, which is the required time in France for convalescence from a C-section.  I never saw her again in my room so I guess that she must have marked my door with a cross to indicate “avoid at all costs….beyond lies work-inducing dragon. Nil by mouth until sense is found.”  I did have a sweet trainee nurse who bathed the babies in the mornings and she showed this tearful, frantic new mom how to do things and assured me that other mothers had done this before and I was not going to suffocate my child. If it hadn’t been for her, I have no doubt that my child would have been on the bottle.

In France, only half of French mothers choose to nurse their babies. In Scandinavian countries, the figure is 95 % and the numbers are in the 60 percent zone in Great Britain and the United States.

An employer in France has the legal obligation to grant a new mother one hour of time off per day to breast feed until her child is one year old. The French maternity leave is 6 weeks before and 10 weeks after the birth of a child. A breast feeding mother who wants to wean her child under optimum conditions can have up to a month off to do so. This was once called “temps de sevrage” but now falls under a larger heading of “congé pathologique”. Enough to make American Moms swoon!

I don’t know from where this French Breast Feeding Mom urban legend sprang and I only have one theory. During the war and occupation in France, provision had been made for more food for nursing mothers and they could withdraw ration booklets from month to month at the town hall… soldiers in the army are not the only ones to march on their stomachs.

Although a very interesting exhibition “Naissance, gestes, objets et rituals” sheds little light on the matter, it is worth checking out. It runs until September 4th at Le Musée de l’Homme on the Place de Trocadéro. However, it is not for the squeamish, as there are photos and films of childbirth throughout the world.

On display are a variety of placenta bowls, clips, and forceps. There is a photo of a child’s bottom covered in meconium. Again, if you don’t know the meaning of this word and have no desire to learn, it is absolutely not an outing for you unless armed with smelling salts. There are even raise-able flaps with smells of maternity wards throughout the ages….still don’t feel queasy…. I already had you at the word breast feeding?

The rest of the museum is also worth checking out. “Tous parents, tous differents’” greets you with a life size photo of a group of 20 full fronted naked people of all ages and races…now that is different! The exhibition explains DNA, blood groups and the family of man.  Another exhibition “Six milliards d’hommes”- Six billion humans, explains in facts and figures, birth, deaths and landmark events in-between, from around the world. Unfortunately, the museum assumes that the universal family of man speaks only French so there is no translation anywhere of the interesting facts. There are headphones for loan, but again, with French commentary.

The little written there about breast feeding was that in 1912, a mother had “no excuses” not to breast feed and in 1940, it was considered a  “moral obligation”.

As with other European countries, France has always had a history of Wet Nurses. It was never the aristocratic or upper class thing to do and this trickled down to the working classes, but for very different reasons. In the large industrial cities where a large percentage of Mothers worked in the family business, it was the practice to place the child with a Wet Nurse, a Nourrice. Nourrice or Nounou is still the term used to this day for a child minder. In Lyons, which at the time was very industrialized especially in textiles, an government run office was set up to regulate the practice of wet nursing, its remuneration and allocation of infants. This was perhaps the first cabinet of mammary hunters as opposed to Head Hunters. Up until the 1900s, fifty percent of infants were placed with Nounous and only a small percentage had their Nounous living with them. The poorer the parents, the further away the food source, so many babies rarely saw their biological mother. As these Mothers no longer breast fed, they became fertile once again and this, in turn, was good for the milk business.

As America was colonized by women with more of a pioneer spirit, it was certainly a necessity to feed your own baby. This was also an Anglo Saxon ideal at the time and was due to a very successful book, reprinted twenty times, first written by William Cadogan in 1748, advocating the benefits of breast feeding and shaming those who chose to farm out their young.

In due respect to those LA Moms who thought that every baby was breast fed in France — they were correct; but at one time, it was not by their own mothers.

Apparently breast feeding is encouraged once again in France but time will tell if the drive is successful. As breast milk makes bigger, smarter babies, if suckling ones baby becomes a public event, blankets ought to be made big enough for college students.